Robert McCoy

[William Seger]

7. Why do you ask us to shovel through this again?

In the first place, no, the buildings were not "designed to withstand alrline jet impacts." They were designed to withstand the expected "live" loading on the floors and the expected wind loading in Manhattan. However, that design was then subjected to an analysis which took an educated guess at the structural damage that would be done by an airliner impact and analyzed the behavior of the remaining structure. That analysis concluded that the building should remain standing, and in fact that's exactly what happened, twice, on 9/11. Until the fires. The designers' analysis didn't include any fire effects because, back then, there was no way to quantitatively analyze fire damage. The designers didn't have the hardware or the software to run the kind of fire simulations that NIST ran (and which "truthers" dismiss, anyway), or the ability to feed such analysis into a structural simulation. For fireproofing, the designers just followed the prevailing building codes; there was no extra fireproofing or any measures taken to prevent airliner damage to fireproofing.

Is this the first time you've heard this, or just the latest time that you've dismissed it?